Category: writing

Luke Cage: another day, another binge-fest

I’ve said it before and I’ll keep on saying it: The Marvel/Netflix team is really nailing the TV superhero genre. Daredevil was great, Jessica Jones was fantastic, but Luke Cage is something else entirely. The winning formula hasn’t really changed: less power, more humour, more humanity; it trumps being able to sling a mountain into the sun any day of the week.

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Cage is much darker than Jessica Jones and hits about the same level as Daredevil, while managing to be a lot more vicious. It tackles gun crime, racism (the N-word is thrown about like confetti), inner-city decay, drugs … You’d think that cramming every urban problem into thirteen episodes would make the whole thing burst at the seams, but it works; my God it works.

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Weirdly wonderful Netflix discovery: Attack on Titan

Sometimes the best thing to do with Netflix is just  follow the suggestions. Do this when you’ve got a free afternoon and you might chance upon a rare gem, like Attack On Titan.

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Set in the future, or maybe the past, on this Earth, or maybe another one, Attack of the Titans tells of a human race under seige from strange  near-immortal giants with a taste for human flesh. The giants (which the hapless humans refer to as Titans) have decimated the population and forced the survivors inside a cluster of cities  zoned and protected by three concentric walls.

Pretty much as expected, the human race is mounting a desperate fight back. An army of young soldiers armed with swords and grappling hooks are humanity’s last line of defence …

It’s classic Manga. the animation is nothing to write home about, but it still manages to pull of some scarily breath-taking action sequences; the subtitles and information pages flash by with barely enough time to read them (I dunno why the Japanese always seem in such a hurry), and there is an awful lot of shouting. And it’s really quire gory too. Our heroes are regularly eaten alive and then vomitted out some time later because the Titans, inexplicably, have no digestive tract.

I watched Season 1, about 25 episodes, in four days, and I’m looking forward to the next series which is just around the corner.

I’d recommend watching Attack on Titan if you’re a fan of the genre; though I suppose if you are a fan of the genre, you’ll have seen it already.

Eight out of ten.